If you’ve ever tripped over your MacBook’s charging cord or watch it yank out effortlessly without dragging your laptop to its demise, you surely appreciate the design of the MagSafe. Its magnetic tip connects and disconnects with ease; the power block it’s attached too mimics Apple’s design ethics.
In all, the MagSafe is a very useful yet functional piece of design but there’s room for improvement. Here’s a few small and big things you can do with the charger.
Keep Your Cord In Good Health
The MagSafe focuses on keeping your MacBook safe from a yanked wire while charging its battery as quickly as possible. The design of the MagSafe allows you to pull and release the cable without moving your MacBook so much as a Millimeter. It not only looks good but serves an important purpose Why don’t you thank your MagSafe with some TLC?
Apple has a great support article on reducing the cable strain placed on your MagSafe power adapter. The two most important tips to reducing cable strain is to give the cord some slack when wrapping it around the brick as shown in the image to the left. The same goes for the magnetic end plugging in to your MacBook; letting it hang freely without strain will reduce the chance of the cable fraying.
Keeping your MagSafe adapter unstressed will you help you avoid things like this
Use Rubber Bands
Keeping in line with Apple’s design aesthetics, the MagSafe power adapter looks and feels like the MacBook which is a good and bad thing. The Upside is you have a great looking power adapter and not a huge, black brick. The downside is its tendency to move about freely when tugged or pushed in any way. Joe Brown from Gizmodo channeled his inner MacGuyver; he wrapped a rubber band around the power block to keep it from sliding. While it’s a simple solution and clashes with Apple’s design of the power block, the rubber band trick works and differentiates yours from a sea of MacBooks and MagSafes
Get An Extended Battery
The MacBook’s 8+ hour battery life is impressive but what if you’re out in the field editing video in Final Cut Pro or touching up images in Photoshop? You’ll suddenly see that 8+ hour figure plummet and limit how much time you can spend on a project if you’re far away from an outlet.
Hyper sells a custom external battery that uses Apple’s MagSafe Airline Adapter to connect to your MacBook. The batteries sold by HyperMac are slim, light and add 10-30 hours of battery life to your MacBook.
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